It’s been a good weekend. Friday night before I went to work, I decided to get a new server for stvlive & the rest of our personal sites. I had been in contact with someone who wanted to get rid of his server he was leasing at a company called cyberwurx. They have an excellent reputation, and the price he got on the server was fantastic. So I accepted the offer at about 7:30pm. He wrote me back, and told me he passed my info on to cyberwurx to get the ball rolling.

I expected not to hear from them until Monday. I got an email from them about 10 minutes later telling me that they would go ahead and rekick the server for me right away, and gave me the info I needed to register with them. So I sign up, get all my login info for their support stuff, and go shower. When I came back down, there was an email saying my server was online, and giving me my IP’s and passwords. So I got started configuring stuff Friday night at work.

Saturday afternoon we woke up, and went out to dinner with Kevin & his wife. It’s always nice to go out with friends. We don’t get to enough After dinner we came back, and I got back to work on the new server. By about 3:00am I had everything up and running on the server, and decided to do a final rsync of the data, and switch the DNS over. Everything works great, except a couple of minor things I need to work out.

Sunday afternoon we woke up, and drove to Columbia to have dinner with Steph’s family. It’s been a few months since we all went out, so it was really nice to see them. Food was good too! Been working on some fine tuning of things since we got back (minus a dunkin donuts run at about 3:00am). Now I’m doin some updates on my desktop, and goin to bed.

So I’m still at work fighting a stubborn hozed harddrive. I’m hella tired, and a bit delerious. These movies have been floating around for some time, but I just cant stop watching this one. The audio is not really work safe, so make sure you put the headphones on if you that sort of thing gets you in trouble. The video is safe.

Just a few weeks ago, I had to completely rebuild my mail server due to a hozed HD. Things were running smooth, and I had managed to get all kinds of shit working that I had been meaning to for a while. Fast forward to Monday night.

Got to work at about 10:30pm and tried to ssh into my mail server. Immediately it returned a connection terminated. So I had Steph go look at the console, and sure enough, it had a kernel panic. She rebooted it, and it did it again. Rebooted again, seemed to be okay. I start investigating the panics, and come to the conclusion that it’s probably bad RAM or the swap partition iz fux0red. As I’m looking around, I get some dma errors (a sign of a dying HD). So when I got home in the morning, I brought the server down to test the RAM. All tested fine. The HD however, told me to go take a flying fuck!

So I spent several hours attempting to clone the drive, but it was too far gone, and kept crashing on me. Finally at about 5:00pm I gave up and went to sleep. I woke up at about 3:00am and started a clean install. Luckily I was able to mount the old HD, and copy the maildir’s, and important configs, so everything seems to be in order now.

Covad got dispatched out again today. Even after I tried to explain to the dispatcher that my DSL was up, just not at the right speed. So when the d00d showed up this morning, I was like go away, and fix my shit at the DSLAM! With any luck this will be closed out today.

Aside from that, I’m working on a migration process to move serve-you.net to a new datacenter. Meanwhile Steph seems to be dying from ebola or some shit.

I’m on hour 24 of my day. I had no intentions of staying up this long, but shit keeps coming up.

I woke up yesterday at about 4:00pm, showered and brought my car the the dealer for an oil change & inspection. To my surprise, it failed state inspection, cuz my tires are starting to show thread all around. So I came home, and ordered 4 new ones from tirerack.com, and had them shipped to the dealer. They should be there by tomorrow or Friday, so I’ll drop my car off and have them mount em n shit, then reinspect it.

After that, we went to get a nice meal at pf changs. It always amazes me how cheap that place is. After dinner, I decided that it was time to rebuild my computer. It has been freezing up in X way too frequently, and it has been doing this through several versions of XFree & nvidia drivers, so a clean install had to be done.

I decided that I’m gonna take a journey into the darkside (ie, Debian). As most people who know me are aware, I HATE Debian for several reasons. Mainly the asshole zealots. But the development branches piss me off, amongst other things. But apt is great, and the stability of a Debian machine is hard to beat.

I recently checked out a relatively new Debian based distro called Libranet, and it was quite slick. One of the only distros out there that I could see using daily. So I figured what the hell,… if I don’t like it, I can wipe it and do a clean install of whatever te fuck else I want anyway. Install was smooth, after updataing just about every package on the system, I now have a nice bloody desktop.

While doing this, I had to take Stephs car to get it’s inspection and emissions done. I got there at like 11:30, and the dude was already gone for lunch till 1:00. So I went to BK and got a vegiburger, then picked up a magazine and sat in the car and read for an hour. Finally at 1:45 I was on my way home.

After that I came back here to work on my computer again, and the doorbell rings. To my surprise, it’s Verizon (completely unannounced). The guy sits out back on the phone with Covad for a while and says, our loop is fine, it’s Covad’s problem. I’m like WTF? So I say whatever, and let him go on his way. I came up here, and checked the router. Sure enough it’s trying to link. I powercycle it, and it links up! However, it’s not performing quite as fast as it should be. Since I haven’t heard back from Covad yet, I can only assume that they are looking into it. So with any luck this might actually fucking work!

Once again Verison has managed to fuck with my life. I am trying to get DSL installed (again), so I can finally get rid of the T1. The process was going pretty smoothly up until covad showed up to light me up. I ordered the DSL on 8/11. Had Verizon setup to install the loop on 8/19. Verizon shows up, finds that I have no free incoming pair for the new circuit. So we lay a temporary line from my NID to the pedistal behind my house. He does his loop test, and all is (supposedly) well. Covad gets scheduled to come out today 8/25 to do the final install. The guy gets here this morning, we figure out how we’re gonna wire this shit in, and get everything set. We test the internal connections we made, and all is good. Go out to the NID, and tap in. Come in, tone the line: NO LOOP! The tests show all kinds of irregularity from the NID to the CO. Showing on one side that im about 9k ft from the CO, and the other that im 13k ft. The error rate is sky high. Obviously there’s a problem on the loop. So this guy calls it in, so they can open a ticket with Verizon. He configures my router so everything will be ready to go whenever Verizon fixes their shit, and leaves.

So I decide to log into the router and do some tinkering. Well, this assmonkey changed the password, and didn’t tell me. So I do some searching on google, and figure out how to bypass the login, get in and change my password. The first thing I see, is that this jackass set my line speed incorrectly. Yes please, give me half the speed I’m paying for JACKASS! So I changed that shit, and now I wait. Could be a day, could be a week. Who knows with Verizon. On top of all this, I get a call from Verizon’s burried line crew stating that miss utility would be out here by friday, and that it would be another week or two after that before they would be out to burry the fuckin line! This being already a week after the temp line was laid.

Is the night over yet? We have been so busy tonight, that I’ve hardly had a moment to think. I got left with about 25 servers tonight. My team is awesome, so we have knocked out most of them, but I’m sure we’ll still be busy till the moment we leave. Fucking 1st shift here is a waste of space. They don’t get shit done, end up turning over all their servers to 2nd shift, who then get slammed since the majority of new servers pop in the late afternoon. Since they end up with all of 1st shift’s mess on top of their own bullshit, we end up with half of their servers. So it’s a vicious circle. If I leave anything for 1st shift, there’s a pretty good chance that it will still be here for 2nd shift. Hopefully things will get better in a couple weeks when we are making some “adjustments” to the shifts. However, I get screwed twice out of the deal, cuz I lose my best employee, and gain the worst of everyone in this organization. My only hope is that he either quits because he wont want to work for me, or he continues being a fuckup on my shift, so I can promptly boot his ass the fuck out of here.

So I’ve been kind of in a daze for the past couple months. Working nights makes you lose all concept of time. I have always liked working nights, but it’s one of those things that you never really get used to. I never know what day it is, not that I really care though. Things have been going pretty well. The job has been great. Rackspace kicks much ass!

Took my RHCE exam yesterday, got the results this morning, and I passed! It was actually harder than I expected, and walked out yesterday not sure if I passed. The sad thing is, the 2 things I knew would give me problems did. If I wasn’t such a lazy turd, I probably could have worked on them a bit more before the exam, and would have completely aced it.

It would appear that I have toasted yet another hard drive. And again, it is on my main machine. I am in the process of trying to salvage the data from the old drive, but I fear that a lot of data got corrupted by fsck when it couldn’t read the blocks. With any luck, it will be okay. I just fucking rebuilt this machine less than two monmths ago!

Today I started my new job at RackSpace. They are opening a new data center here, and I am a operations tech. Basically, I build machines, and fix em when they take a shit. Since the DC is not up yet, we are basically building the entire infrastructure (well at least enough to go live on the 1st). On Sunday, I’ll be traveling to San Antonio, TX. to do some training for a week at HQ. It’s pretty cool so far. I’m really excited for a new opportunity. The company is great, and I’ve admired them for quite some time. I dealt with a few people at RackSpace while I was still working with Plesk, and they were always cool. Making a halfway decent salary again doesn’t hurt either 😉